I got a new laptop, a Samsung Series 3 that came with Win8. I disabled the secure boot in the bios, and set it to be “UEFI and Legacy OS”.
Launched KDE live CD (suse 12.2, 64bit) that booted perfectly.
So i ran the installation, erasing everything on the HD, and creating my usual partition setup:
sda1 - swap
sda2 - /
sda3 - /home
after rebooting I got an error that there is no active partition.
I tried to read in the forum about UEFI issues but most relate to dual boot of WIndows and openSuse.
Is there a simple way to install the system ? am i missing something ?
When choosing grub-efi i get an error that the combination of x86_64 and grub-efi is not supported so i don’t know if i can continue.
The first thing I can say is that if you want to install openSUSE in UEFI mode, you have to use the install DVD, not the live CD. Further it is possible to perform a legacy installation which uses MBR partitioning. In that case, you would install grub2, not grub2-efi
If I were you, I would:
blank the first track of the HDD from a live system. Thus, assuming your HDD is sda (make sure!)
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=64
download and burn the 64bit installation DVD
Make absolutely sure that it will boot in UEFI mode. If you don’t see “ELILO” while booting, reset, call BIOS setup, put the “UEFI” CD/DVD device on the first postition.
Install openSUSE and choose grub2-efi as boot loader.
There is a bug in YaST2 (at least during installation) with GPT disks in Legacy BIOS mode (or more precisely with non-efi grub2). YaST2 will attempt to install GRUB2 on partition which is simply not possible in this case. It must be installed in MBR only.
I don’t get it. It is supposed to create a BIOS partition in this case (kind of binary ESP). That’s what Fedora does since version 16 or 17, I guess.
How about installing openSUSE on legacy hardware with preexisting BIOS partition, for example in dualboot on a system where Fedora is already installed? Actually I intended to try that for a year or so. The machine is here. I haven’t touched it. No time.
Is YasT not able to create or use the BIOS partition?
And who’s supposed to deal with GPT + BIOS partition: grub2 or grub2-efi?
@Argoson
If you install in UEFI mode, you don’t care. At least, you won’t be affected.
How about installing openSUSE on legacy hardware with preexisting BIOS partition, for example in dualboot on a system where Fedora is already installed?
And the question is? By default it will install bootloader in partition so your Fedora will continue to boot. And you need to add openSUSE to Fedora boot menu. Or you tell it to install into MBR. In this case you need to add Fedora to openSUSE boot menu (OK, may be os-prober will handle it for you).
That’s not different from MBR case. Only when there is no existing bootloader you get problem.
Edit: of course, as long as openSUSE won’t replace MBR with generic MBR … there is controversial information whether it does it by default or not.
Is YasT not able to create or use the BIOS partition?
It’s not the problem. It tries to install grub2 on, say, /dev/sda1 instead of of /dev/sda. Because default is to install bootloader into partition
And who’s supposed to deal with GPT + BIOS partition: grub2 or grub2-efi?
grub2 (or, since 12.3, grub2 + grub2-i386-pc as opposed to grub2 + grub2-x86_64-efi. 12.3 made more logical packaging of platform independent utilities as grub2 and platform dependent targets as grub2-$target).
Worked !! thanks so much
For future reference, what i did was disable the Secure Boot option in BIOS, and selected UEFI OS option. Ran the steps described above. grub2-efi was selected automatically. A new partition was added - FAT (sda1) where /boot/efi is located.
